


Tinúviel

by Numendil



Category: 19th Century CE RPF, Literary RPF, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Literary History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-03 21:06:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16333469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Numendil/pseuds/Numendil
Summary: The secret history of a poem.





	Tinúviel

_Hampstead, England_ _  
_ _14th May, Sx.A. 1819_

He cannot sleep; already the first throes of illness are upon him, forcing him into a feverish wakefulness. He does not yet know what ails him, only that it will be bitterly slow to kill him: he will last nearly two more years before the consumption takes him at last. From out his window he hears a song, high and sweet. The voice that sings it is not human—perhaps it is a bird. It must be. Yet there are words to it, or so he would swear, in a tongue more fair than any of mortal men.

The effect it has on him is powerful, even intoxicating; now he fears to sleep, for fear that he will not wake up. Instead, he grabs a pen and a scrap of paper from his night-stand and scribbles a quick verse—

 _My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains_  
_My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,_  
_Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains_  
_One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:_  
_‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,_  
_But being too happy in thine happiness,—_  
_That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees_  
_In some melodious plot_  
_Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,_  
_Singest of summer in full-throated ease._

The song is sweet, a strange sweetness, like the wine of some far green country that knows no winter. It is a perilous sweetness, too; it is potent, and yet of it he might never have drunk his fill. Visions start to swim before him, a star-lit forest—

 _O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been_  
_Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,_  
_Tasting of Flora and the country green,_  
_Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!_  
_O for a beaker full of the warm South,_  
_Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,_  
_With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,_  
_And purple-stained mouth;_  
_That I might drink, and leave the world unseen._  
_And with thee fade away into the forest dim:_

There are no forests here, in suburban Hampstead. Yet it is no garden bird singing this song: this music is too fair to come from a place so touched by the ugly hand of Man. The birds that sing like like this live only in the most ancient of all forests, that have stood since the world was made. That which sings this song remembers what no mortal could—a time without evil—

 _Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget_  
_What thou among the trees hast never known,_  
_The weariness, the fever, and the fret_  
_Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;_  
_Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,_  
_Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;_  
_Where but to think is to be full of sorrow_  
_And leaden-eyed despairs,_  
_Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,_  
_Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow._

The visions take him fully, and he is standing there in the forest, beneath a young and unstained moon. And the stars! O the stars! even hid above the canopy they seem to twinkle supernaturally bright, like living beings, angels gracing the earth with their light. He is not in England, or if he is, it is England before it was England, when the Earth itself was new—

 _Away! away! for I will fly to thee,_  
_Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,_  
_But on the viewless wings of Poesy,_  
_Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:_  
_Already with thee! tender is the night,_  
_And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,_  
_Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;_  
_But here there is no light,_  
_Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown_  
_Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways._

He can see little, but now the forest is so close he can smell it: the scents are, however, strange to him. Whatever flowers perfume this glade have long since died out, and yet they are familiar. The scent of summer is the same everywhere. He continues on, stumbling toward the sound of the song—

 _I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,_  
_Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs_  
_But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet_  
_Wherewith the seasonable month endows_  
_The grass, the thicket and the fruit-tree wild;_  
_White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;_  
_Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;_  
_And mid-May’s eldest child,_  
_The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,_  
_The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves._

Then he sees her—the singer, it must be, for she dances to music from an unseen source, the fairest maiden that ever was upon Earth, in the dark forest illumined as if glowing with her own light. Dark is her hair, and her raiment blue as the unclouded sky; her pointed ears prove her to be a fay, but her eyes are those of an angel. He stops suddenly, and cries out in a voice not his own—

‘Tinúviel! Tinúviel!’

 _Nightingale,_ he knows the word means, though he knows not the tongue. She turns when she hears his cry, and her eyes meet his, a haunting, burning violet. He feels the weight of doom fall upon him then, a burden impossibly heavy; he knows what it means, yet he welcomes it—

 _Darkling I listen; and, for many a time_  
_I have been half in love with easeful Death,_  
_Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,_  
_To take into the air my quiet breath;_  
_Now more than ever it seems rich to die,_  
_To cease upon the midnight with no pain,_  
_While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad_  
_In such an ecstasy!_  
_Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—_  
_To thy high requiem become a sod._

Suddenly he knows that it is not he who is falling under the Nightingale’s spell; he who first loved her passed from the world uncounted years ago. This is only a memory, a song and its faery singer who has endured the rise and fall of nations and empires—

 _Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!_  
_No hungry generations tread thee down;_  
_The voice I hear this passing night was heard_  
_In ancient days by emperor and clown:_

—and further back, into the days of myth—

 _Perhaps the self-same song that found a path_  
_Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,_  
_She stood in tears amid the alien corn;_

His visions take him still further back, into the days that were myth to the creatures of Man’s myths, and he passes Westward, through a secret door amid the Sea, and he sees a land unsurpassably fair, Godhome of ancient legend, ringed in by mountains that seem to scrape the sky. And amid those mountains there is one taller than the rest, shining whiter than snow, colder than death, silent, immutable, terrible as the shadow of God’s light—

 _The same that oft-times hath_  
_Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam_  
_Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn._

Then, quickly as it has begun, the song ends, and the visions vanish, and he knows no longer whether he saw or heard anything at all. Sick at heart, he pens one final verse—

 _Forlorn! the very word is like a bell_  
_To toll me back from thee to my sole self!_  
_Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well_  
_As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf._  
_Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades_  
_Past the near meadows, over the still stream,_  
_Up the hill-side, and now ‘tis buried deep_  
_In the next valley-glades:_  
_Was it a vision, or a waking dream?_  
_Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?_

* * *

In a neighbouring house, the ancient minstrel finishes his song. No mortals remain who know the tongue; if any heard it, they might mistake it for bird-song. Yet, as is the way with Elven-speech, the words carry their meaning with them, and the well-attuned may yet discern it. As nearly as it may be rendered in the speech of Men, the ending of his song runs thus—

 _The Sundering Seas between them lay,_  
_And yet at last they met once more,_  
_And long ago they passed away_  
_In the forest singing sorrowless._

Slowly, Daeron sets down his harp.

**Author's Note:**

> Every time I read this poem, I wondered, 'Why does he think the Bird is immortal?' Then I saw the word 'elf' in the next stanza and realised. Of course, it figures that the elf canonically called Nightingale is the one who turns out not to be immortal.
> 
> The original version of this had Maglor as the singer, but a commenter pointed out that Daeron makes more sense, and his fate is equally unknown (although I imagine he would have gone to Valinor eventually).


End file.
